January 25, 2007

The Intelligent House* in Provincetown

By María Suárez Toro, Wings of the Butterfly

The GAEA Foundation gave us a grant bringing us to this house in Provincetown. The residency lasts for two months and will be spent developing the musical Alas de Mariposa (Wings of the Butterfly) for Costa Rica.

When we received the grant, the suggestions governing the use of this old friendly cottage at the edge of the sea on the Cape Cod Peninsula and Massachusetts Bay were longer than the description of the artists' residency program itself.

After all, the residency was precisely that: Support for artists from different parts of the world to sojourn in this peaceful, simple spot near the sea, removed from the noise of the world. Best of all, the setting satisfies all the needs of the artists, one or two in the cottage at a time, to dedicate two months to developing their artistic projects.

The photo of the cottage that we received in the mail was quite beautiful, as was the description: A colonial structure with three floors, built in 1620 in the town where the English Pilgrims first disembarked from the Mayflower when they came to America.

Before the Pilgrims and before colonization, indigenous peoples, called Wampanoag, lived here, besieged by Vikings and pirates from the seven seas.

After the pilgrims, the town of Provincetown became a port for Portuguese fishermen and later whalers. Today, the town, which has no more than 3,500 inhabitants during the year and almost 50,000 in the summer, belongs to artists and has at least 30 art galleries and 54 docks, although it measures barely 12.8 kilometers along the coast.

Fishermen and descendents of the Portuguese community continue to live here. In spring, tourists and students come to watch and study the whales.

Originally the cottage where we live was a bakery. The basement walls bear witness to its past: marks from wood ovens used to cook bread remain there still.

The bakery was originally located on the other side of the bay, on Cape Cod. In 1860 the house was moved as one piece, by ship, to Provincetown and converted into a summer home.

At the beginning of this century, Gaylord Nelly, founder and president of the GAEA Foundation, bought the cottage for the artist residency project, which is managed with the support of the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in town. There are 20 Fine Arts Fellows in the FAWC Program, including writers, painters, sculptors and painters from all over the world. We are the only Latin Americans.

The house's intelligence

The welcome letter to our GAEA artists' residency program included a series of detailed instructions on caring for the bicentenary house made of old but solid wood, its equally ancient furniture and its modern heating system and electricity.

The recipients of this grant, Guadalupe Urbina and this author, traveled on January 1st from Costa Rica and Puerto Rico respectively, to move into the cottage on the second day of the new year.

We entered quietly, almost tiptoeing through the already imagined living and enduring museum. The wood floors creaked under our feet and the many doors opened the way, one after the other, to the 12 small chambers dividing the small and cozy cottage of barely 290 squared meters over three floors.

So many doors, so many little rooms, so many floors! At first I could not understand it from my viewpoint of a life spent in the tropics. But Guadalupe lived through many winters in Holland and she loves to open and close doors, so from the beginning she felt at home, discovering the secrets of the mysterious residence that had been so many things at so many different times.

In contrast, I was a bit disoriented. I love to design and build houses, but the three places I have built are in tropical Costa Rica and were constructed in modern times; I couldn't assimilate this architectural surprise.

Both Lupe and the house itself were opening my perception to the “irrationality� of so many compartments, so many doors and floors. And I was discovering that it was an intelligent house. Molly* – one of the characters in Alas de Mariposa – would love it! It's intelligent, like her.

All the floors creak, as if to remind us, without saying a word, that it is an old house that must be cared for with each step. The wood speaks, not only when we walk across it, but also as it shakes with the wind and the inclement cold of winter, reminding us that old things must be treated warmly for them to last a long time.

These creaking floors are the only reminder that you share the cottage with another person because it is designed in such a way that you do not hear what is happening from one room to another although with occasional sound of movement in the cottage tells us each person is in her place, working.

Strange, but that's the way it is. Guadalupe is in her bedroom playing the guitar and I am upstairs in mine, writing and listening to music, and neither of us knows for sure what the other is doing. Architecture that protects the privacy of its occupants while at the same time connecting them is not very common today. It reminds you as well that if you stop moving, you can go unnoticed. How intelligent!

What most impressed me about the cottage's “IQ� is that all the rooms are separated by a system of double doors with at least 20 centimeters between the doors. It is incredible how each of these spaces becomes an insulating chamber against the cold (and, of course, noise). It is as if, with old wisdom, the house knows that it must conserve energy and how to do so and, even better, knows how to put us to work as we move through its rooms.

The wisdom of its walls

The walls also speak. They are covered by art on all sides. In the kitchen there is a print of a quilt by artist Natasha Kempers-Cullen entitled, “The Kitchen Madonna.� It shows a woman surrounded by kitchen utensils and the food she cooks, but she is so large and powerful that she seems to master over all the tools of her work. Below it reads: "The Madonna is flying out of the pan!"

Another artistic piece that made a deep impression on me is in my room on the third floor. It is a notebook with fabric pages comprised of different textures, some with writing and in others, the textile design is the message. The artist Lauren Camp made it in 2003 when, in the heat of the most recent declaration of war from her country's president, she was invited to teach art to adolescents from schools in impoverished suburbs in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Tell Me Your Story� is the name of the piece. Its pages include writings by soldiers, political prisoners, poets, and even a memorandum from the Bush Administration's State Department about the war in Iraq. One page says: “In the presence of social injustice and abuse, silence is almost as damaging as injustice itself.�

In the bathroom there is a beautiful painting by the artist Tabitha Vevers which says that she wishes to give her husband a message. The husband appears in profile in the painting, in the lower right hand corner, looking at the artist, who has risen out of a fountain to throw herself flying into the air. Flying, it says: “In a lucid dream I am showing my husband that flying is very like water ballet, except you do not need to hold your breath.�

I hope we remember this idea as we work on Alas de Mariposa. Not having to hold our breath to fly as we do things the way we want to.

The small but select libraries in some of the rooms of the cottage speak to us of the other artists who have preceded us in the residency, since the beginning of the program in 2001. There is the work of Biljana Kasic, from Croatia, about the history and culture of the former Yugoslavia and the role of women in the fight for peace and social justice in the region. Also included are books of Paula Gunn Allen, a Native American, about spirituality and indigenous literature, and the work of Julia Sudbury, an Afro-European, about the cinema of the American diaspora. The descriptions of Alice Tuan's plays, of Prema Murthy and Lauren Camp's plastic arts and of Sue Johnson's photography, can be found amidst books on globalization, ecology and art in general.

In essence, this cottage speaks all the time, but the sound of the telephone interrupts it when we have been here for only a few hours. Guadalupe answers. I think it's a survey or a census. She passes me the phone so I can answer in English.

The pollster kindly explains that she is calling from the United States Department of Commerce. She explains (in English): “I would like to ask you just one question: How many people in the house fish?�

“One,� I say, without thinking.

“What does your husband fish for?�

“I don't have a husband, but I fish for red snapper, jack, dolphin and kingfish.�

“What?

“You haven't asked me where I fish. I fish in Costa Rica and in Puerto Rico. I just arrived from fishing there, but we're here to do art.�

The ‘well-mannered' public official immediately hung up on me. No matter. I stay silent. I prefer to listen to the house and get to work with Lupe on Alas.

(**) "Molly, La michrochip inteligente"

(Molly, The Intelligent Microchip) is the title of one of the chapters in my unpublished book which is the basis of the play, Alas de Mariposa. Molly is an imaginary construction of the scientist and futurologist, Michio Kaku of the United States, in his book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and Beyond. To explain what an intelligent house will be like within 20 years, Kaku provides the example of an executive's apartment. It has a robotics system, named Molly, which takes care of everything, absolutely everything, in the house. Molly is even capable of guessing what the executive needs, because she is programmed to know his needs in advance. With this book, Kaku attempts to show us what an intelligent house of the future will be like given the development of technology. My book and the musical Alas de Mariposa, by focusing on Molly, shows that technology is not neutral. I won't tell you the story; read the book when it's published and see the musical.

• Photos by Margaret Thompson & María Suárez Toro.
• Translation by Nicole Lisa.

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